Down and Out

For 18 days in 1972, Thomas Eagleton, who died this week, was the Democratic vice-presidential candidate. Clark Hoyt was the cub reporter who abruptly ended his bid for office. Hoyt reflects on journalistic responsibility and regret.

Transcript

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Former Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton died last Sunday. His time in the national spotlight was brief. For just 18 days in 1972, Eagleton was the candidate for vice president, chosen by George McGovern in his run against Richard Nixon. Eagleton was a dark-horse contender who said he was as surprised as anyone when he got the call. THOMAS EAGLETON:Three minutes ago, George McGovern called and he said, Tom, I've got a favor to ask of you, and I said, what's that? He said, I want you to be my running mate. And I think I said something like, I hastily accept, before he could retract and withdraw it. BROOKE GLADSTONE:Eagleton's selection came without so much as a background check. Eager to fill in his story, the Knight Ridder newspaper chain decided it needed a comprehensive bio. Cub reporter Clark Hoyt drew the short straw, and within days he found his lead. CLARK HOYT:An anonymous caller called The Detroit Free Press, one of our newspapers, and asked to speak to John S. Knight, who was the founding father of Knight Newspapers. The operator connected the caller to John S. Knight III, his grandson, who was an editorial writing intern at The Free Press.

The caller said that he knew that Senator Eagleton had suffered from depression and had been treated with electroshock therapy on more than one occasion. And this caller was sure that the Republicans would find this out and use it in some underhanded way during the political campaign, so the caller believed it should get out immediately. BROOKE GLADSTONE:What did you do with the tip? CLARK HOYT:Well, even before I learned about the tip, I went to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and I asked them if I could use their library and read all of their clips on Senator Eagleton. Newspaper clips in the old-fashioned envelopes are really quite revealing things.

And what I saw were, in a very vivid, active public career, there would suddenly be gaps that would be unexplained. Sometimes there might be just a small paragraph that would say, Senator Eagleton has been at the Mayo Clinic for a physical exam, or Senator Eagleton has been exhausted and taking a rest, something like that. So there was already a red flag. When I got the tip, it had more credibility than it might have had otherwise. BROOKE GLADSTONE:So once the facts lined up, or at least the flags lined up, did you go to the campaign? CLARK HOYT:No. I started looking for a doctor, whose name we got from the tipster. And this doctor was no longer in practice, so it was quite difficult initially to locate the person. But I did, and, in a very nervous voice, I said, I'm Clark Hoyt from Knight Newspapers in Washington, and I want to talk to you about the time in March of 1961 when Senator Eagleton was treated with electroshock therapy at Renard Hospital in St. Louis.

The doctor looked at me in horror, and as she slammed the door in my face, she said, I can't talk to you about that. BROOKE GLADSTONE:And so what happened after that? CLARK HOYT:Well, Robert S. Boyd, my bureau chief and I, worked on this together. Then ultimately we wound up with a two-page memo that we did take then to Senator McGovern's campaign. What we didn't know at the time was he already knew. We understand that the same tipster had called the McGovern campaign and told them the same information. What we were told is, Senator Eagleton is on his way out here. You'll have an interview with him. We're as determined as you are to get to the bottom of it.

Within a day or so, we knew that we were being strung along. What they finally decided to do was to have an immediate press conference and have Senator Eagleton announce his mental health history. THOMAS EAGLETON:On three occasions in my life, I have voluntarily gone into hospitals as a result of nervous exhaustion and fatigue. As a younger man, I must say that I drove myself too far. BROOKE GLADSTONE:And in answer to a question, he said part of his treatment was shock therapy. CLARK HOYT:That's right. Big news at that point. The campaign had sort of broken, in my view, an unwritten rule between reporters and campaigns in the sense that we had a story and they simply announced it to the world. And so, in what they themselves referred to as a "consolation prize," they put us in a car – Bob Boyd and I - in a car with Senator Eagleton to drive from Custer back to Rapid City, South Dakota and the airport.

Senator Eagleton was sitting in the back seat. I was next to him, asking him questions all the way to fill in the profile of him that I had originally been assigned to do. He was very gracious, answered every question, some quite uncomfortable questions. Throughout it, he chain-smoked the entire time. He was perspiring profusely. And by the end of the ride, I was soaking wet from him. BROOKE GLADSTONE:And you probably understood that that was the end of his vice-presidential ambitions and possibly the end of his political career. What did you think of the consequences of your actions, or did you at all? CLARK HOYT:Yes, we thought a lot about the consequences of our actions, and Bob Boyd and I have talked about it a number of times. And we always felt that it was a story that was appropriately in the public domain. We don't know everything about Senator Eagleton's medical history. He never released any records. He never authorized his doctors to talk publicly about his case.

But what we do know suggests that under great stress, or times right after great stress, he tended to shut down, and, on at least two occasions, he required hospitalization and the shock therapy.

And for someone who is aspiring to be Vice President of The United States, the proverbial heartbeat away from the presidency, I always felt that this was relevant information about his qualifications, his fitness, if you will, for the job. I don't see how we would have done it any differently. BROOKE GLADSTONE:Given what you learned about Thomas Eagleton, were you convinced he wouldn't have been a good vice president? CLARK HOYT:You know, that's a very good question. I am convinced that he was a very good senator, and he was reelected twice after that. He could have been reelected from Missouri as many times as he wanted to be. He was a very effective senator. He was one of the leaders in the War Powers Act in the Vietnam era.

In private life, afterward, in St. Louis, he was a commanding figure in Missouri politics. He taught law at Washington University. He was obviously a man who had a very full and rich public career. He might have been a fine vice president, but the question really is, could he have been a good president? And I don't think we really know the answer to that, because we don't really know what the nature of his condition was, whether it was all ancient history or whether, under stress, it might have been repeated again. We just don't know that. BROOKE GLADSTONE:Clark, thank you very much. CLARK HOYT:Brooke, thank you for asking me. BROOKE GLADSTONE:Clark Hoyt and Robert Boyd won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for their Eagleton reporting. Clark Hoyt is currently an editorial consultant for The McClatchy Newspaper Company. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER] THOMAS EAGLETON:I will not divide the Democratic Party, which already has too many divisions. Therefore, tomorrow morning, I will write to the Chairman of the Democratic Party, withdrawing my candidacy.

About On The Media

WNYC’s weekly investigation into how the media shapes our world view. Veteran journalists Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield give you the tools to survive the media maelstrom.

WNYC 93.9 FM and AM 820 are New York's flagship public radio
stations, broadcasting the finest programs from NPR, PRI and American Public Media, as well as a wide range of award-winning local
programming. WNYC is a division of
New York Public Radio.